Scary Business ...

I saw a photograph the other day of one of my favorite musicians. He looked like a bloated caricature of a cartoon monster. He’s a few years older than me, but has been a music icon in this country for forty-plus years. We kind of grew up together, he in the public eye and me in total obscurity. We’ve never really met, but have rubbed elbows a couple times. After looking at the picture I just want to go slap him and yell “What’re you doing? Is this what forty million dollars does for a guy? Go look in a mirror! Have some respect for yourself.”

Okay, so it’s one picture and it could’ve been a bad angle and my reaction might be over the top. But I am horrified and I wonder why. After examining my reaction I realize that what the picture really does is scare the hell out of me. That could be me looking like a melted meat-and-cheese sandwich. I don’t ever want to look like that and any notion that it might be inevitable is terrifying. The notion of aging gracefully and the photograph of my clay-footed hero are diametrically opposed.

What I’ve taken from this little experience is some very strong motivation to slow down on my bad habits and put some more oomph into the few good ones that I’ve managed to develop over the years. In that sense, the cartoon guy is still working as a role model. Sure, it’s a reverse kind of role model, but he’s still doing some good, in my life anyway. Maybe I should tell him that instead of yelling at him. Just because he’s got forty million bucks doesn’t mean he’s a really happy kind of guy.

That’s a fundamental truth, I think. Developing and maintaining a positive attitude about most everything really works to ensure a clear head and a healthy outlook. Think healthy, be healthy. Or something like that. It seems very simplistic, but maybe that’s part of the life lesson we should all pay attention to and learn from. Simple doesn’t necessarily mean limited. It also doesn’t always mean easy.

I think what I’ll do this evening is go find a recording my reverse role model made years ago, put it on, and listen carefully. I’ll contemplate the vagaries brought on by time on the planet and how they manifest differently for different people. Fate, whether real or not, is an interesting concept. Where were we when this music was recorded and how different are our lives now? Who’s to say if there’s a “better” to be understood? All I know is that I really don’t want to end up looking like that photograph. My ego won’t stand for it and has fueled a positive response that might serve me well for years to come. Wisdom is learned and, more importantly, invariably earned.

Life of Wryly

A wry smile has come to live on my face over the past couple days. Some buddies and I split and moved somewhere in the neighborhood of three cords of wood last Sunday. The wry smile came because without ibuprofen, I’d probably be a crippled wreck. Even with a bloodstream full of anti-inflammatory drug I can feel the lactic acid begging for release in my tight hamstrings. I can feel the tight pain along both triceps and my goofy left elbow burns white-hot if I move just wrong.

And speaking of neighborhood, I’m guessing my neighbors weren’t too pleased with the constant roar of the hydraulic splitter going on from ten until three-thirty or so. None of us intrepid workmen even wanted to consider what it might have been like had we not had the modern marvel of that splitter with a Honda engine. These were big rounds of Doug Fir and a splitting maul just bounced off. It would’ve been a half-hour’s work to split just one of the rounds, and brutal work at that. Well, at least for us city boys. Okay. At least for me. Even twenty years ago I might have been more inclined to swing the maul. But this time. No way, Jose. If you figure the cost of renting the splitter and the gas it took to run it, we still came out ahead on the firewood.

Now I get to remember what it is like to be physically sore from exertion. I, as do (I assume) many men my age, like to think that I am still at least mildly athletic, with some muscle memory of past prowess. Is it true, or am I in absolute denial? And do I really want that question answered?

I don’t know. I’m beginning to recognize myself in those advertisements about the typical American gut. You know the ones, some faceless tummy waddles by and a serious voice intones something about how Americans are hopelessly obese. Shocking! Hey, I might be one of the poster boys. But I’ve never thought of myself as obese. Am I a fat guy? Yeah. I gained thirty pounds when I quit smoking and haven’t jettisoned it yet (two years later). I keep talking about it, but , so far, I’ve left it where it is. I’m probably waiting for somebody to lose if for me. What an interesting delusion.

Americans use 25% of the current fuel resources on this planet. That’s where we’re truly obese. The bellies are just a symptom (mine included). If you haven’t yet, go Google T. Boone Pickens, or check out http://www.pickensplan.com/. The guy’s a pretty smart guy and he’s got a bee in his bonnet about how we can make a difference. If we just sit on our fat asses and keep the denial working overtime, we will deserve whatever ignominious fate that comes. I believe it’s high time we all started paying a little more attention to ourselves and our immediate environment. As good things happen, one will rub off on the other.

See you next time.

Holidaze

Ah, the Fourth of July. Rather than creating a rant, I'll just offer this poem. I'll get back to the goofy stuff after a while. But now, the real world intrudes.

Reminders in Early July

Who wants to remember
the stench of the dead,
smoking skeletons of bushes
festooned with body pieces.
Dali meets Bosch.
This bod’s for you.

Who can forget
our most uncivil war,
atoms and flash burns blinding a generation.
A minuteman, cocked hat askew,
plays big cop on the corner of the world.
The freedom to revel in
politically correct enmity.

Desert sand to glass and
a million spent rounds of depleted uranium.
This rad’s for you.
The blood spoils and the children
are eaten by god who praises their hatred.

We celebrate a history of war,
mimicry of small arms and cannon,
young eyes alight with power,
smoke and flame in the streets.
Dangerous delight.
Living on Old Glory.

Not Food? Not Good

I read through a recipe book last night and put on about four pounds. Maybe I should start reading “Cooking Light,” or something like that.

I think Michael Pollan is right: “Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.” His book, “In Defense of Food,” is an entertaining and quick read. I think he’s hit the nail right square on the head as he hammers the notions of how what we eat went from food and, through some corporate, government-sanctioned slight-of-hand, became what we have come to call nutrients. It really does need to come full-circle back to food. What is food? If a grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, it’s probably not actual food, but is probably a food-like substance that has been refined by some multi-national conglomerate and marketed as something that your body absolutely cannot do without. “And, boy does it taste swell!”

Mr. Pollan wonders if this slow insidious shift from food to nutrients is one of the fundamental causes of America’s obesity epidemic. Hey. I’m not an expert or a particularly learned food maven, but I don’t have to be quite so cautious. In my opinion I don’t think there’s any question about it. When we got away from real food is when we started to get fat. That’s when we started to see an incredible increase in heart-disease, diabetes, and people wearing Levis. Of those three things, only one is positive. If more people wore Levis, I think, the world would be a more relaxed place.

But I digress. Happily. Let’s leave at this: go read Michael Pollan’s book, “In Defense of Food.” It’s worth every minute you spend. And while you’re at it go find his other work and read that too. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to become educated in the realm of where our food comes from, what it takes to sustain its growth and delivery, and how it should be looked at in the whole of human society.

Here’s a link to discover more about Michael Pollan’s work:

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Michael+Pollan

Shhh! Don't Talk About That Stuff

Among people who know me, I am simply a remarkably dilapidated seventeen year-old. How am I doing at fifty-eight? Not too bad. My health care system tells me that my “numbers” are good, mostly within range, and that my blood pressure is fine. I had the dreaded Sigmoidoscopy and asked if I could keep the video. The answer was no. Then, last year I had the even more dreaded knock-yourself-out-full-meal-deal colonoscopy. I got to sleep through that, which was just fine with me.

This stuff is important. I had a very good friend who woke up one morning, went into the bathroom to study the constitution for a while (I just do a crossword puzzle) only to discover he was seriously bleeding. He drove up to the hospital and was told he had cancer of the colon and was dead six weeks later. He’d had no symptoms until he happened to look down before he flushed the toilet that morning.

Now, really, does anybody really want to talk about this stuff? Hell, no. Apparently, it’s not politically correct. It’s not genteel to discuss bodily functions, fluids, and solid wastes. To quote a good friend: “Erpie pew-pew.” I mean, if you’re in an elevator somewhere and either you or the darling administrative assistant next to you cuts the cheese, drops a Cobalt bomb, or however you want to euphemize passing gas, and the result triggers your gag reflex, you can’t just smile and say: “Whoa. That’s awful!” or “Jeez. Stick a cork in that superfund site!” No. It’s not polite. You can comment on a friend’s gas, but not a stranger’s. I guess it has something to do with embarrassment, yours and the stranger’s. This same reluctance transfers to open discussions about the health and performance of your guts, or anything that involves gooey physical detritus.

I propose that we have a national Talk-About-Your-Guts Day. We would all benefit. If we can save one life by encouraging frank and honest dialog about how to educate people to pay attention to their what-goes-in-and-what-comes-out system, wouldn’t it be worth it?

And the next time you catch yourself idly thinking about a friendship, I think you can be enlightened by answering the following question: are farts funny? If your answer is yes, most likely you have yourself a good friend.

Next time, let’s riff some more on this Political Correctness theme. It’s one of my pet peeves. If you’re going to keep a pet, it’s best to keep it fed, eh?

Recovery Time

In the dim and misty past I was something of an athlete and party animal. Both of these activities placed large amounts of stress on my physical person, the protoplasmic envelope in which I exist. I like this envelope. It is certainly limiting and slow compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but I derive a great deal of pleasure from simply living inside it. I am blessed with a strong and decent machine. I don’t have movie-star looks, but I pass muster and have also been blessed with a confident nature that helps others look past my obvious faults. When I was a young man I was fairly invincible and enjoyed working out with weights and walking long distances. My knees have thanked me to this very day for nurturing an intense loathing of any kind of distance running. I prided myself on being darn near unbeatable in a fifteen yard sprint. At sixteen yards I went from first to last. So I learned to stay with what I was good at.

I remember all of this very well. My wife thinks that I use my prodigious creative talent to enhance my memory, but that’s a story for another day. I went along gracefully through life, thinking that it was perfectly normal to work all day and party all night and then get up and do it again. What’s the big deal? Sure, I might feel a little tiredness as day after a short nap began, but that passed and I grew stronger as the time went on. Serious hangovers were a different matter, of course, but again, those stories are for a different day.

This was life. It went on for years. The future was forever and the past was just the past. No thoughts of old Glory Days came up because I was living the Glory Days and I knew it. Money was scarce, but so what. We were having fun and the future was a bright glow at the start of each day.

Then something strange happened. Intense physical activity had always brought stiffness and the ache of lactic acid in the large muscles, but all you needed to do was stretch, get some blood flowing to those sore muscles and it went away. Nothing to it. But one morning, I don’t remember which one, exactly, but it was there ... yes, one morning the stretching didn’t work. The second stretch didn’t work either. It wasn’t until the third or fourth stretch that things went back to fluid normal. I would imagine that I just shrugged and paid this anomaly no more heed.
Until, of course, this anomaly became a regular occurrence. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I needed to limp a little bit even AFTER a shower. All of a sudden I had to pay attention (always a challenge for me). I started to ask the real athletes I knew about this. Those my age all nodded and shared my puzzlement. Those older just sighed. “Welcome to the real world, kid,” they’d say.

Hmm. Real world? What the hell were they talking about?

It became apparent all too soon. I began to learn about something called Recovery Time. I was a Pitcher on the baseball team in school, a reliever mostly. I threw hard every day. I kept playing Ball after school. My arm was made of steel. Recovery time meant a good night’s sleep. Now, like the professional players, it meant four days of resting it. That made sense because of the enormous stress put on it. But the rest of me was good to go. Wasn’t it? Suddenly, it wasn’t. I started noticing soreness that lasted a full day. Then it became two days. I actually had to work out more carefully and move the target group of muscles around each day. Hell. Nowadays my body goes into shock and I don’t even GET sore for two days and it lasts a week.

Welcome to the real world, kid. This decline leveled off to a plateau that slowly descended as I gained weight and lost muscle mass. I became a working writer, which put my expanding butt in a chair for hours every day and I lost my wind and, slowly, my desire to compete. I “retired” from playing Ball at what is now the frisky age of forty-eight. Things kept popping and straining and ripping loose. These were actual injuries that required medical attention and extended healing periods. My machine had become an adversary instead of a trusted friend. I even had to quit smoking, which is something I will write about in the future.

Waitaminnit! The realization hit me like the hot slap of a flabby forearm. I was getting OLD! How could this be?

Stay tuned for more on this insane revelation.

The Eyes Have It. Or Not.

The eyes have it. Or not, in my case. Of all the issues I’ve had to learn to deal with as I experience this aging thing, losing my ability to see things clearly, close up, has caused me the most grief. It started out innocently enough. I’d be at a restaurant and suddenly the light would be insufficient and my arms were just not long enough for me to comfortably read the menu. And the typeset … why was the type so small? Unbelievable.

It slowly dawned on me, much to my wife’s delight, that I needed reading glasses, that I was succumbing to the condition called presbyopia, which is a Latin word meaning What Does That Say? At first, I liked the fact that I needed to fish glasses out of my pocket to read what was in my hand. It made me feel studious and smart. It advertised that I knew how to read. Hey look! This stuff is so important that I need to apply extra effort just to read it. Wow. It must be important. It made me feel like I’d joined some exclusive club. Yeah. The Can’t See Shit club is always groping for new members.

In some cases, it is very important to read things, operating instructions on a nuclear submarine, for example. Your restaurant bill too, because what you point to on the menu might be poisonous or worse, like cost over thirty dollars. I mean, how would you know? If you’ve ever been to a fancy joint that publishes no prices on the menu, you know what I’m talking about. If you can’t read the price, it might as well not be there. So I am relieved to fumble for the glasses, put them on, and knowingly study. You can’t be pulling a fast one on me. Nope. I know stuff.

Without the need for glasses to defeat this presbyopia thing, none of this entertaining drama happens. But I tire of drama. Reading isn’t the only thing that goes away with aging eyes. I love working on my motorcycle. I like to feel connected to my Flaming Engine of Death and when I’m trying to ascertain if, say, a gasket is properly aligned, I need to be able to see the sharp edges of the surfaces involved. If I’m in the electrical system, I need to see connections and deal with small screws. Without my glasses I’m helpless.

Okay. Now, I’m starting to lose my patience. It’s one thing to look studious and engage those fantasies of brilliant professorship. It’s entirely another to be completely at a loss while looking sideways at a tiny screw hole as your glasses slip down your nose and you Can’t See Shit. That damn club keeps demanding dues.

I'm learning to compensate. I have glasses in every room in the house, including the bathrooms. I have glasses in my tool chest. I have glasses in my saddlebags, my jackets, all of my vehicles. I’m starting to feel pretty smug. But that only lasts until I experience the unthinkable. I put on my pair of glasses and I slowly realize that I still Can’t See Shit. How can this be? What happened to my glasses? They worked great yesterday. Dread clutches at my heart as I slowly realize that my eyes have decayed beyond the capabilities of the glasses I’ve so meticulously stocked everywhere. What? I need NEW glasses? Sometimes, irony is not pretty or even particularly entertaining. Off to the store I go, looking for glasses that advertise a bigger number. +1.25 just doesn't cut it anymore. Fortunately, I've discovered that there is a great way to recycle glasses that don't work anymore. Just leave them in restaurants, or the library, or the counter at the supermarket. Believe me, some aging boomer will really appreciate it when he or she discovers that their own glasses have mysteriously vanished.

More dues to pay. This Can’t See Shit club is really getting on my nerves now. This impatience with my condition ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s just a pain. Light is certainly a key factor. If I can shine enough light on what I’m trying to see, I almost don’t need the glasses. Some days are better than others. But the bottom line is that I have resigned myself to this dance of augmenting the ability of my meat machine to function at peak performance. So far, as I creep toward sixty, my eyes are the friction point of my aging process. I have yet to experience much of what is supposed to come as I slide out to pasture. My parents, who are vastly amused when they hear me whine about this stuff, have assured me, with no small measure of satisfaction, that my "time is coming." My mother says: "Getting old is not for the squeamish." Oh boy. I wish this felt like Christmas did when I was little.

Next time, I’ll bring up physical recovery time and see what happens. Stay tuned.